Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment, as examples. The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allow more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller packages that utilize less area than packages of the past, in some applications.
Some smaller types of packaging for semiconductors include quad flat pack (QFP), pin grid array (PGA), ball grid array (BGA), flip chips (FC), three dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs,) wafer level packages (WLPs), bond-on-trace (BOT) packages, and package on package (PoP) structures. However, these packaging techniques require organic substrates, which have a high cost and a large form factor.
What are needed in the art are improved packaging structures and methods for semiconductor devices.
Corresponding numerals and symbols in the different figures generally refer to corresponding parts unless otherwise indicated. The figures are drawn to clearly illustrate the relevant aspects of the embodiments and are not necessarily drawn to scale.